Northlight

'Does that make you feel better?' he asked me.

Fane is quite bright. Don't underestimate him.

'You'd have probably missed.' I walked slowly back to him.

'No,' he said.

'You missed with that fucking bomb.'

He lifted an eyebrow. 'I wish you wouldn't take it quite so personally, Quiller.'

'Just natural reflex. It'll pass.'

I forget exactly which page it's on in the book, the dark blue one, the first one they make us read, Structure of Employment, but I remember what it says, we all do. It should be borne in mind at all times during Briefing and Clearance that you are considered to be expendable, and that at any given moment during the course of a mission it may be decided that in order to protect security or to accomplish the objective, your freedom, welfare or even life may be forfeit.

They lose quite a few of their recruits when they throw them that particular book in Norfolk — you can feel the draught. But there are substantial compensations to widows and so on, and some people feel it can't ever happen to them, while others get some kind of neurotic kick: the brink isn't enough, they like a sword over their heads as well.

'What went wrong?' Fane asked.

I stared at him. 'You don't know?'

'I mean with the bomb.'

'Oh. It's not the first time I've been near one.'

'You mean you sensed it?'

'Does it matter?'

'Yes. If that man didn't set things up properly, Croder will want to know.' The man I'd seen on the train.

'He did a good job.'

Fane had the grace to glance down. 'It was the only way I could arrange matters. London made a deal with the Kremlin from the start.'

'Before I was briefed and cleared?'

'Yes.'

'Bloody Croder for you.'

Fane looked up again. 'You know the system.'

Life may be forfeit, so forth. 'It doesn't mean I have to like Croder. What was the deal?'

'We don't need to go into that now.'

I stood close to him. 'This time I want to know.'

He shrugged, dropping his cigarette-end and putting his foot on it. 'Both sides needed the summit, urgently. The Soviets knew that the American public wouldn't allow the president to meet them in Vienna, after they'd sunk the Cetacea, so a cover-up was agreed on. It was the only way they could protect the summit, and the only way the US would go ahead with it: by demanding vital concessions in the resulting talks as a form of penalization for sinking the sub. But there was a risk.'

I 'Karasov.'

'Yes. The Soviets knew we'd listened to the tape, but that was destroyed now. Karasov was still alive, and might talk to the world media, a living witness to the Soviet's guilt. Again, the American people wouldn't let the president go to Vienna.'

Sound. Very slight sound.

'The Soviets didn't know where to find Karasov. He was our own sleeper. So it was agreed that the moment we had him in our hands we would let them know, and let them despatch him.'

'Kill him.'

In a moment: 'Yes.'

The snow on the roof, stressing it, making the slight sound.

Rationalize.

But I turned my head to the left. The right ear feeds aural input to the left hemisphere for logical analysis and I wanted to know more about the sound, and if it meant danger.

'He was, after all, a Russian,' Fane said. 'And a traitor.'

'And trusted us.'

He shrugged.

'Trusted us with his life.'

He gave a sigh. 'Northlight was set up to protect world peace.'

'So a few dead espions along the way don't count.'

'Of course not.'

'All right,' I said, 'I'll buy that.'

'Jolly good show.'

Tiger.

'But why did you want me out of the way?'

He lit another cigarette and blew out smoke. 'It wasn't quite like that.'

Tiger, tiger, burning bright, in the warehouse of the night.

'What was it like, then?'

'We had to-'

Not a very big tiger but I put up an arm block as it sprang for me and bounced off and hit the floor with its ears back and its claws out and a sound of total menace going on in its throat like a distant police siren; I was quite impressed.

'Pussy, you old bastard, stop that noise.'

What surprised me most was that Fane had his gun out. Local directors aren't normally so nervous.

'I think you're over-reacting,' I told him, and he put it away. The cat hadn't actually meant to attack me — they don't do that, it's not their nature. It had wanted to reach the fish crates and I was in the way. You can't always tell what's going on in their minds but I suppose it thought we were in here to open up the crates and there'd be a chance of nefarious pillage — the thing was near death from starvation, the winter and everything, and the locals in this region wouldn't keep these things for pets, they'd prefer them deep fried.

'We had to flush Karasov,' Fane went on, 'and hand him over to the Soviets. They said they'd finish him off. That was the deal.'

'But you didn't trust them.'

'Of course not. Before they killed him they would have put him under implemented interrogation and got everything out of him — our Murmansk network and all that goes with it.'

Fifteen agents, according to the background briefing I'd had in London. Fifteen agents and their communication channels and cover construction and courier lines and cypher modes: a major intelligence coup, not to be contemplated. I could see their point.

The poor little bastard was clawing at the fish crates, well not little, for God's sake, it was the size of a wolf, but there was no flesh on it, just fur and bones.

'Why didn't you put Karasov in the crosshairs?'

'It had to look like an accident' Fane said. 'We had to flush him, but we couldn't kill him.'

'You could have said it was the Rinker cell.'

'The what?'

'The Chinese.'

'But we couldn't have proved it. There was only one way we could really convince them.' He looked down again, concentrating on his cigarette.

'By blowing me up with him.'

'Yes.'

'Who-' but I left it at that. It didn't matter who'd thought of it, who'd given the final instructions, probably Croder but it could have been someone even higher than he was in the Bureau because even in our trade we don't regard the death of a shadow executive as a family joke and Croder would have needed the sanction of a special committee. Bloody vultures, who did they think they were, to put a man's neck on the block, to write his death certificate while he was still alive, while he was- Steady, lad, steady. They were the Bureau.

'You'll never do it that way, Pussy, don't be such a bloody twit.' I went over and smashed my boot down across the fish crates, breaking a wire, smashing it down again and bringing splinters away while the cat shrank back with its ears flattened and its eyes huge in the gloom and that low wail in its throat as I brought my boot down again — 'Don't you swear at me, you old bastard, or I won't get your supper-' down again and ripping the whole side of the crate away as the fish came tumbling out — 'Go on then, bon appetit and all that.'

I swung around to face Fane — 'So what the hell was that rendezvous all about, the one in the freight-yards, what was the KGB doing there right on time if we were both meant to be hanging from the roof of that fucking barn with our guts hanging out — come on Fane I want to know.'

He drew in some smoke. 'That was just window-dressing. We told them you'd be there to meet the courier.'

'What do you mean, for Christ's sake?'

'It was to cover the contingency of your getting caught and interrogated. You would have admitted the rendezvous, even though you weren't going to keep it.'